


Beds of Roses

by artifactstorageroom3_archivist



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Child Abuse, Established Relationship, Kid Fic, M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-09
Updated: 2009-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-13 03:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15355149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artifactstorageroom3_archivist/pseuds/artifactstorageroom3_archivist
Summary: Ten years after his dissertation is leaked, Blair wakes upon the morning of his first wedding anniversary.





	Beds of Roses

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Elaine, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Artifact Storage Room 3](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Artifact_Storage_Room_3) and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2018. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Artifact Storage Room 3’s collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/artifactstorageroom3/profile).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** This was written for ASR3’s  First Birthday/First Anniversary celebration.  My first thought was to make a little snippet where Blair and Jim had gotten married. I picked a state that allowed gay marriage, and then it kind of grew to explain _how and why_ the boys were in Iowa…

Blair stared at his bedroom ceiling as the dawn painted it different hues of yellow and orange. The small, cheaply crafted dream catcher in the window distorted a couple of the wavelengths making the colors reminiscent of the skin of a peach. Fuzzy, yet beautifully mixed for all of its indistinct colorings. The smell of morning reached his nostrils, and although he was now used to the smell of the plains and its dew laden grass, a large part of him still yearned for the scent of the mountains.

He easily ignored the wave of homesickness that washed over him at the thought. It was an old ailment, and one that he was no longer certain that he’d like to rectify. 

Smiling just a little, he turned on to his side to stare at the man who rested beside him. 

Jim’s head now sported a fair mixture of grey. At least, it did where he still had hair. The bushy mustache that his partner sported still shocked Blair on occasion. It didn’t seem natural, not even after all the years that had passed. When Jim was asleep, it was almost as if there was another person who had stolen in and taken his place by Blair’s side. 

It was a strange notion of course; Blair knew that the instant Jim’s eyes cracked open the strangeness would evaporate just as the morning mist would when the sun ascended further into the sky.

Idly he reached out and stroked at the soft hairs that grew at the back of Jim’s neck. The other man didn’t even so much as stir. Jim’s subconscious had known the feel of Blair’s hands long before they had become lovers, and his senses had developed to subconsciously discern the feelings that Blair conveyed through his touches. The gentle caress of fondness would be quickly read and dismissed as not important enough to rouse the sentinel from his slumber.

If Blair had more… strenuous activities in mind, well that was another story. In fact, given Jim’s rather enthusiastic groping last night, he’d be pinned to the bed right now. But… he wasn’t exactly in the mood. Not that he’d say ‘no’ should Jim wake up and decide they should have a tumble, but the morning seemed bred for introspection not love making.

Blair’s fingers traced a familiar oval pattern on the edge of Jim’s jaw. He’d bitten him there the first time that they’d made love. It hadn’t been in a moment of passion either. It had been out of a moment of sheer nervous clumsiness. Two zigs where one of them should’ve zagged had resulted in an overly emphasized bite instead of a gentle nibble. The whole event had been awkward and desperate and quite possibly the most disastrous sexual encounter Blair had ever experienced. He wasn’t sure about Jim’s perspective on it. He’d never had the guts to ask.

But the result of that uncomfortable coupling had left a hickey on Jim’s face that couldn’t be hidden by any article of clothing that either man owned except for a scarf. Summer in Iowa wasn’t made for scarves, and according to Jim, the man at his job interview that day had stared at the mark for the entire amount of time that they had their meeting.

Jim had recounted the story with a smile though, and it had been that day that Blair realized that things were really going to be good between them. That this whole crazy scheme of Jim’s would truly work. They could still be themselves even if they lied to other people about who they were.

Blair had never told Jim about his doubt in ‘the plan.’ It had been an unexpected life preserver tossed at him while he was drowning, and he had just plain grabbed on. Not without second thoughts, no he’d had those so frequently over the years that he could almost have the entire internal debate in less than two minutes. There was no need to spend more time on it than that. The simple truth would always win in the end. He wasn’t sure if he could stand to be without Jim, so with Jim was where he was going to be.

It was almost Zen-like in its simplicity. Naomi would either approve wholeheartedly or be annoyed by Blair hiding his co-dependency behind a guise of spirituality. He would probably never get the chance to ask. 

Another familiar ache reared its head at that thought. That hurt wasn’t as easily dispelled. He would never quit missing his mother, and a part of him would always hate himself because he had willfully chosen Jim over her. Neither Jim’s offer nor Blair’s acceptance of that offer had been about Naomi, but the end result had been a necessary estrangement. 

In his mind’s eye, Blair could still hazily envision the second time that he’d come home to find his belongings packed in cardboard coffins. He remembered that it felt like his heart was strangling him from the inside as he had stood there just staring at the neatly stacked boxes. He didn’t recall saying anything, but Jim had once told him that he’d been babbling half formed apologies and pleas for forgiveness.

Jim had also told him that he’d spouted some nonsense about recanting everything and calling himself a fraud as if the whole world would accept that he’d spent years of his life faking tests and research about a previously documented phenomenon. 

He had been in the middle of explaining his scheme to Jim when the detective had gently led him over to one of the boxes and opened the lid. 

Jim’s things had been inside.

“I had a call from an old buddy, Chief. Somebody out there wants me pretty badly. He says that there isn’t much time, but he can get me out of Cascade safely. You… you aren’t in any kind of trouble yourself.”

Blair’s hand had reached out to finger the soft shirt that had rested at the top of the box even as his head had moved back and forth in denial.

“The cat is outta the bag here, Chief. Pandora made her great escape. You can deny it until you’re blue in the face. They’re gonna come anyway.”

“We’ve got to stop them. Call the press. If you disappear…”

“These are professionals. You think that a little press coverage is going to keep them from their goal? They can fake a car accident or claim I’m under witness protection or create a hundred different scenarios that the public will believe. Hell, they might even disprove your thesis so that nobody would even take you seriously. You’d be just another crackpot spouting off about conspiracy theories.”

“I’m so sorry.” Blair remembered whining not having anything else to say.

“Don’t… it’s past the time to be sorry, Sandburg. Way I see it, you’re going to have to make a hard choice here, and you’re going to have to make it pretty damn fast. Either you stay here, or you come with me.”

Blair’s confusion had shown on his face, and Jim had taken pity on him to explain. 

“Look, Blair, I won’t say I’m not mad at you, furious even, but I don’t have a lot of time right now to be indulging in that anger. I just had to pack up my life here. I had to make decisions about what I needed and what I could leave behind. Thing is, I… I don’t want to leave you behind. I want you to come with me. This, hell I’m not going to lie to you, this could be forever here. Just you and me. It’s a shitty proposition, Chief, but I have to ask you because I can’t live with knowing that you might have said ‘yes.’”

Blair had just stared blankly at Jim in response as his brain balked at trying to process the bizarre turn of events.

Jim’s mouth had turned down slightly after a few moments. “Well, at least I know now. Look, I’m going to leave you the loft. It’s… I don’t want anybody else to have it, and it’s going to be a while before your royalty checks start coming in. I really, shit Sandburg, I really…”

“Yes,” Blair had blurted out suddenly and decisively.

“What?”

“Yes, damn you. God, Jim, for a detective you sure do jump to conclusions pretty damn fast.” Blair remembered grumbling even as he had made a mental list of what sentinel information was in his office at Rainier that he would need to take with. There wasn’t much. He kept most of his important books and manuscripts at the loft, and Jim would have already packed those away.

“Blair, I don’t think you understand here. There isn’t going to be anybody else on this wagon train. You aren’t going to be able to tell anybody who you really are. You aren’t going to be able to talk to your friends, Naomi…”

“I get it, just you and me, right? I’m not stupid. I get the concept of dropping out of sight. I did start college at sixteen you know. That is kind of a good marker for having a few smarts.”

“Yeah, but Chief that means…” Jim had made an indecisive yet strangely lewd hand gesture while he blushed deep crimson.

Blair had rolled his eyes in response. “Yeah, I figured that when you practically asked me to run off with you just now. Real romantic there, Ellison. You picked a hell of a time to tell me, too. One step at time though, huh? We need to pick up a couple of journals I have at the campus before we jet, and I’m guessing that time is of the essence.”

Things had been surprisingly easy from there on out. Actually, given how their lives normally operated, it had been almost scary. For all their typical bad luck, their escape had gone smoothly. Blair liked to think it was a cosmic balance thing.

 The loft and Jim’s remaining possessions had been left in his father’s care. Blair’s in his mother’s. He and Jim had moved around fairly frequently for the first eighteen months building red herring trails in some places and fake backgrounds in others. Jim had grown the mustache and started wearing unnecessary glasses. Blair had chopped his own hair and taken to wearing thick, horn rimmed glasses to accompany his new professorial wardrobe.

 During those months, neither of them had ever brought up the subject of being intimate with each other. It wasn’t necessary. They had ‘an understanding’ between them, and it was enforced by stern looks by both sides whenever the other was caught looking in another person’s direction. For all their understanding though, they never consummated their relationship. It just never seemed right to do it in haste or to do it in the spirit of need when they were so actively trying to avoid pursuit.

Looking back on the time, Blair still wasn’t certain how he’d made it so long with just his hand for company. He never thought that he had it in him. To be absolutely truthful, he wasn’t even sure why it had seemed so important to wait. In hindsight it seemed absurd, but wait they had.

Then, one day, Blair’s new identity had been offered a job at a small community college in Iowa. The pay was bad, but the college was desperate, and the dean never so much as blinked when Blair announced his wholehearted homosexuality.

When the news came that Blair had the job, Jim had taken one look at him and announced that he should take it. Then he had floored Blair when he announced that it was time to settle down.  “ _Yes, in Iowa. Seriously, Chief, who is going to look for us in Iowa?”_

Shaking his head to clear it of its memories, Blair smiled at the man sleeping beside him and increased the pressure of his fingers on Jim’s nape.

“Terry?” Jim’s mouth mumbled as he tried to wake.

“Mmm, maybe. Or, I could be this wild anthropologist who mysteriously disappeared ten years ago after making one of the most significant anthropological discoveries of the decade.”

Jim’s eyes cracked open at that to glare at his lover.

Blair swatted him on the shoulder in response. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s our anniversary.”

“I know. It’s why I’m taking you out to dinner tonight.”

“And why you’re going to have roses delivered to my office today, even though you know it annoys me.”

“Well, I’m a married man now. I’m supposed to get in the good graces of my spouse by the purchase of dying flora.”

“We’ve been together too long. You’re starting to sound like me,” Blair pointed out good naturedly, “and you were giving me roses long before I said, ‘I do.’”

“Well, we were married long before we were married. It’s why you didn’t have to change your name when we tied the knot last year, remember?”

“Of course I remember. I’m not the old one in this relationship.”

“But still going grey and losing your hair,” Jim shot back with a grin.

“JIM!” Blair protested in fake shock only to have his mouth covered with his husband’s hand.

“Jesus, Terr, what’s gotten into you today?” 

Blair rolled his eyes and jerked the hand away from his mouth. “Don’t be a freaking Neanderthal.”

“I wouldn’t if you weren’t acting so strange. What if somebody hears you?”

“It’s a quarter to six on a Tuesday morning; nobody is going to hear me.”

“Tala could hear you.”

“Talasi is still sleeping, and if I know that, you sure as hell know it too,” Blair snipped with a bitterness that surprised him let alone Jim.

“Chief?” Jim’s tone had turned worried very quickly as evidenced by the nickname that he called his husband.

It was only trotted out on very, very rarely these days. Jim had been proposing the last time that he’d used the appellation. 

With a grunt of irritation, Blair reached over to the night stand and slapped on the white noise generator that adorned it. It was the single most unromantic sexual gift he ever given anybody, but it had been necessary when the kidlet had moved in. Sex with Jim had gone from embarrassingly bad to incredibly hot, and they weren’t ready to give it up just because there was a new set of sentinel ears in the house.

“We’re going to have to tell her someday anyway,” Blair groused as soon as he flipped the switch on.

“Tell me we aren’t going to have this argument again,” Jim moaned as he pushed himself up into a seated position.

“I’m just not into hiding stuff from my child.” Blair retorted automatically even though the subject wasn’t what was bothering him.

“Terry, we talked about this. Multiple times. She’s still young. There’s no telling who she’d tell. She’s got weekly appointments with a psychiatrist for God’s sake. Do you have any idea what could happen if she starts telling him that her daddy is really the very famous Blair Sandburg?” Jim hissed.

Blair tried not to flinch at the sound of his given name. He tried not to miss it, but there were days that he’d give anything to hear Jim yell ‘Sandburg’ at him. 

“She’s twelve, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep waiting. She’s a smart girl, and it isn’t like she doesn’t know about keeping secrets. She hasn’t told anybody about her abilities. I don’t think that waiting to tell her the truth is going to do us any favors in the future. Don’t you think that she’s getting a little curious about us?” Blair replied calmly. 

“She’s still a child. Let her keep at least part of that innocence a little longer. Don’t you think she’s been through enough? You saw how they…”

“I’m very well aware of how she was living. I was with you when you found her, remember? I can fish out the papers for the assault charges if you need a reminder,” Blair interrupted hotly.

Jim smiled slightly and grabbed the fist that Blair’s hand had made. Gently he raised it to his lips to place a kiss against its knuckles.

“I remember. I fell in love with you all over again that day,” he whispered softly.

Blair snorted. “That woman had Tala chained to a fucking doghouse, Jim. A doghouse. All because she realized that the kid was a sentinel and her foster mother thought that moving her out to the back yard would keep her from overhearing some illegal conversations. It was my thesis that put her in danger like that. A broken nose was the least I could do.”

“You don’t know that. She could’ve figured out that Tala could hear those things all by herself. My father did. All you did was give it a name.”

“Yeah, and I almost blew our cover too. We were seconds away from being the human interest story of the week,” Blair said agitatedly.

Jim swallowed and looked down at the coverlet. “I remember.”

Blair closed his eyes and mentally kicked himself. Of course Jim remembered. It was Jim who had spent all night packing up their belongings in case somebody reading the paper made the connection between Dr. Terrence Everstone and almost Dr. Blair Sandburg. It was Jim who spent all night sending highly coded messages to his covert ops contacts to see if their situation was in peril.

It was Blair though who spent his night breaking into the hospital’s records and changing the results of Talasi’s tests to show that she just had exceptional hearing. It was a gambit that paid off. The news feeds that were all set to proclaim that a new sentinel had been found being treated like a dog were changed and shuffled from the front page to the human interest section where more subdued, but still enraged, reporters talked about the neglect and abuse the poor child had suffered.

That in and of itself might have made the nightly news if it hadn’t been for a local dam breaking and flooding over acres of farmland. The local news media covered that story instead. What the local media didn’t put out for consumption, the national media couldn’t pick up and run with. So while the townsfolk gossiped about heroic Dr. Everstone, the world at large was none the wiser. 

It was a near miss that had made both Jim and Blair ornery with each other for days. 

When Blair had suggested that they take the girl in, Jim almost went through the roof.

 Almost, but not quite, because he had to admit that Blair’s logic in the matter was pretty sound. Despite the press coverage of ‘The Sentinel’ there had only been one other confirmed case besides Alex Barnes and Jim Ellison. 

Hector Rodriguez had decided to ‘go into seclusion’ to avoid strain of the media attention. His long time girlfriend insisted that it wasn’t true, that Hector wouldn’t just leave his friends and family like that.

The press labeled her a pathetic woman who couldn’t get over being dumped. 

Alex, well, the people after Jim didn’t have any more use for her than they did for any other vegetable taking up space in a mental ward.

But Tala was a girl they would certainly have a use for. She was young and easily trained, and any family that took her, no matter how loving, ran the risk of exposing her as a sentinel. 

Revealing her wouldn’t only ruin her life, but would bring danger really close to his and Jim’s backyard. 

It hadn’t been the best reason in the world to bring a child into their lives, but it had been a sound one. And there were far worse parents that the girl could get.

Jim hadn’t been happy, and Blair didn’t blame him for that. A child was a big change, and Blair had to admit that if they had to run again, having a child would make them a much easier target. 

Two gay, white males and a mixed race girl would stand out wherever they went, and that was just being tracked down. The weapon that she could be made into to use against them… 

But at the same time Blair knew that there was no way that either he or Jim could not help her. They’d always be checking up on her to make certain that she hadn’t been kidnapped. And should those people make an attempt to take her, he and Jim would intervene. Standing on the sidelines while an innocent was in danger would be an anathema to the both of them.

But it was Jim who had ended up putting the final word in on the subject, “All the people and all the places in the world, and the fourth sentinel known happens to end up in our town? I think destiny is fucking with us.”

With that oh so eloquent declaration, Jim had thrown himself into being the father that he wished that he’d had, and Blair started saving money for lawyers and adoption proceedings.

“Hey, you zoning on me here?” Jim’s voice cut into Blair’s thoughts.

“No, just remembering. Time doesn’t just fly; it like rides in a fighter jet. You realize that we’ve been married for a year, been parents for six, and been gone from home for ten now? Tala is gonna be thirteen in a couple months man, when did we get old enough to have a teenager?”

The lines in Jim’s face deepened for a second before he spoke, “Home?”

“Well, you know, Cascade.”

“You still think of it that way?”

Blair shrugged. “Why not? You do. You’re its sentinel.”

“That’s territory, not home.” Jim spoke softly as he traced a finger along Blair’s eyebrow.

Blair closed his eyes and leaned in for a kiss. He wasn’t disappointed. Gently he prodded Jim’s mouth with his tongue, but his husband backed off with a reproachful tap to his nose.

“Save it for later, Romeo. We’re going to have this place to ourselves tonight, and I’d like to do something other than sit on the couch and whine that I ate too much at dinner.” 

Blair laughed and smiled fondly before his face turned sober. “You ever think we’d end up like this? I mean if, if they’d never come after you, would you ever have, you know, with me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes? Just like that? You really think that you would’ve?”

“You think that I asked you to come with me just as a spur of the moment thought? I was so damn crazy about you for so long I thought between that and my senses I was going to end up in a mental ward.”

“But you never…”

“What women you weren’t chasing, you were encouraging me to chase,” Jim reminded him. 

“I could be foolish back in those days,” Blair observed.

“But good hearted.”

Blair shrugged but chose not to make a comment.

“I had thought about asking you so many times, but it never seemed like the right time. Then all my choices were taken away, and I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about timing anymore,” Jim continued to explain himself.

“And now, here we are.”

“Here we are,” Jim agreed with a tender whisper.

Blair took a moment to stare at his husband. Prickly mustache and receding hairline aside, Jim Ellison was still a fine looking man. More importantly he was still a damn fine human being even if he was no longer a cop.  A rose with a hair-thorn lip. The thought made Blair laugh.

“What?” Jim asked as an answering smile began to appear on his face.

Blair simply shook his head and grinned. “I love you, Henry Everstone. Happy Anniversary.”

 


End file.
